difference was that the Scottish evictor concentrated in one day of sword and fire the desolating work which in England and in Lowland Scotland was diffused over many years. Whether the result be that of a day or of {70} a hundred years, the folly and the guilt are the same. The same fate as overtook rural England and Scotland has in even more fateful degree overtaken Ireland. The vast majority of the Irish are now outwith their native isle. In the Ireland of to-day only the derelicts are left. Throughout the length and breadth of the three kingdoms, the country places in which strong men were reared have been made desolate that cities in which men decay might extend and enlarge their slums. III In this devastation of the country places the abnormal process of eviction played but a small part compared with the normal processes which worked steadily for the emptying of the country and for the growth of the city. A blinded legislature sacrificed everything to the growth of an industrial civilisation. What the ruling classes wanted was the increased prosperity of Glasgow and Birmingham; it mattered nothing though the {71} country-folk perished. They had, however, some consideration for the countrysides. They caused schools to be built everywhere at the expense of landlords and tenants. But in these schools they caused nothing to be taught but the dates of battles and the names of rivers. In them there was nothing taught of the wonder of growing life, of the miracle of earth pouring food into the lap of men, of the glory and beauty of the greening earth, or of the dignity of breaking up the fallow ground. I say, nothing of worth was taught in these schools--nothing, except what roused an unhealthy craving for the life that could be lived with unsoiled hands! And for the support of these schools one lady who owned a large estate in the west had to sell her jewels that she might pay the school rate, and tenants parted with their stock for the same end. For the State had decreed that the country places should pay for the support of those processes which were to work their own desolation. Landlords were {72} made bankrupt and tenants ruined that bloated cities might grow more and more.